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About the Authors
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Stephen Cornell is Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona,
where he also directs the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy. His PhD
is from the University of Chicago. He taught at Harvard University for
nine years and at the University of California, San Diego, for nine more
before joining the Arizona faculty in 1998. He has written widely on eth
nicity and race and on issues involving indigenous peoples in the United
States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cornell, Stephen E. (Stephen Ellicott), 1948Ethnicity and race: Making identities in a changing world /
Stephen Cornell, Douglas Hartmann.—^2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-4129-4110-5 or 978-1-4129-4110-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Race. 2. Ethnicity. 3. Minorities.
4. Group identity. 1. Hartmann, Douglas. II. Title.
HT1521.C64 2007
305.8—dc22
2006028317
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
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2
Douglas Hartmann is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of
Minnesota, where he teaches and writes on social theory, multiculturalism,
popular culture, and race relations. He received his PhD from the University
of California, San Diego. He is the author of Race, Culture, and the Revolt
of the Black Athlete: The 1968 African American Olympic Protests and
Their Aftermath (2003).
Contents
Foreword
xi
Preface to the SecondEdition
xiii
Preface to the First Edition
xvii
Acknowledgments
xxi
1. The Puzzles of Ethnicity and Race
An Unexpected Persistence and Power
A Puzzling Diversity of Forms
Ethnicity and Race as Sociological Topics
An Outline of What Follows
1
5
10
12
13
2. Mapping the Terrain: Definitions
The Definition of Ethnicity
The Definition of Race
Ethnicity and Race
Nationalism and Belonging
Conclusion
15
15
21
26
35
38
3. Fixed or Fluid? Alternative Views of Ethnicity and Race
The Assimilationist Assumption
Primordialism
Circumstantialism
Primordialism and Circumstantialism Compared
Conclusion
41
44
51
58
70■
71
4. A
Constructionist Approach
The Construction of Ethnic and Racial Identities
The Nature of Ethnic and Racial Bonds
The Problem of Authenticity
The Reconstruction of Circumstances
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rontations led by the American Indian Movement to the angry protests of
government of Malaysia amended that country’s consti
tution, adopted at independence from Great Britain in 1957, to secure the
preferential treatment of Malays in education, business, and gorern^nt
yainst the objections of the sizable Chinese and other ethnic populations
»’ “““ “
fich’
Coast of Texas, competition over scarce
hing resource kd to violence between Euro-Americans and immigrant
Vietnamese. A White fisherman was killed; Vietnamese fishing boats were
burned; and eventually the Ku Klux Klan joined the fray. Many Vietnamese
immigrants finally fled the region.
^
namese
In the 1980s and 1990s, minority Tamils launched a violent insur
gency against the majority Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, an island nation off the
utheastern coast of India, crippling its economy and killing thousands In
rratricide (Tambiah 1986) continues.
ethnic!!;’
of the Soviet Union-one of the world’s most
ethnically diverse states-pried open the lid on what was supposedly a
socialist melting pot, to reveal a boiling stew of ethnic sentiments^Ld poHt
jcal movements. Ethnic conflicts followed in several regions of
Soviet Union. Among them, Ukrainian and Russian minorities in Moldova
struggled for their own independence in newly independent GeorgiaanTrr’h
Azerbaijanis fought over territorial rights and occupancytatt^^”^’“ envisioned independence from Russian and entered a Ivastatmg war m an effort to achieve it.
other right-wing groups directed against Turks, Greeks, Spaniards North
^ricans of various ethnicities, and other immigrant groups who came to
Germany over the preceding three decades in search of jobs. Arsonists
torched immigrant-occupied apartment houses; men, women, and children
re beaten on the street; and dozens of foreigners were killed.
3
• In 1993, in a special issue devoted to multiculturalism in America,
Time magazine published a story titled “The Politics of Separation.” The
subject was the impact of growing ethnic diversity on U.S. campuses. The
magazine reported a perception among some students that “to study
anyone’s culture but one’s own … is to commit an act of identity suicide”
(W. Henry 1993:75).
• In 1995, French Canadians in the province of Quebec came within a
few votes of deciding that the province should separate from the rest of
Canada, in all likelihood eventually becoming an independent country.
“We were defeated by money and the ethnic vote,” said the province’s pre
mier, a leading separatist, referring to non-French-speaking voters of vari
ous ethnicities who narrowly defeated the separatist effort (Farnsworth
1995:1). Before the vote, the Crees, indigenous people living within the
province, took out a full-page advertisement in Canadian newspapers
announcing their own overwhelming vote against Quebec’s separation. The
Crees promised that if Quebec were to separate, they and the vast lands
under their control, in turn, would separate from Quebec, remaining part
of Canada.
• Also in the 1990s, the term ethnic cleansing emerged from the chaos
that followed the breakup of the former Yugoslav federation in southern
Europe and engulfed the nascent country of Bosnia. The term, coined by
Serbian nationalists, referred to the forced removal of non-Serbs from ter
ritory claimed or sought by Serbs. It was accompanied in the Bosnian case
by wholesale human slaughter, starvation, and rampages of sexual violence
directed against Bosnian Muslims by Serbian and Croatian soldiers and
civilians. As one commentator pointed out, “ethnic cleansing” had now
joined “the euphemistic lexicon of zealotry,” along with Nazi descriptions
of the Jewish Holocaust as “the final solution” (Williams 1993:H-3).
These examples admittedly focus on conflict and division, which were not
the whole of the ethnic story in the 20th century. Ethnic and racial diversity
and identity were also sources of pride, unity, and achievement. The United
States often paid tribute to its immigrant origins and the cultural pluralism
that resulted (for example, Kallen 1924). Various groups—from Mexican
Americans to Haitians to Arab populations from the Middle East—^proudly
celebrated their own cultures and identities even as they struggled for entry
into American prosperity. The Kwanzaa festival, for example, became an
annual African American celebration, a time for family, reflection, and com
mitment. On U.S. college campuses, in corporations, and in major cities, lead
ers dealing with ethnic and racial issues argued that diversity should be a
4
Ethnicity and Race
strength not a weakness. When the U.S. women’s gymnastics team won a
gold medal at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, the ethnic composition of
the team- an Asian American, an African American, and white girls with
names like Miller and Moceanu” (Lexington 1996)—was itself viewed as an
merican accomplishment, something the entire nation should look upon
with pride. Debates about affirmative action, the content of school curricuum, and immigration policy led at least one American analyst to suggest, at
century s end, that “we are all multiculturalists now” (Glazer 1997).
•
j-rr
““^’^iculturalism and its insistence on recognizing and valu
ing the differences associated with ethnicity and race were not unique to the
nited States. Since its founding, Mexico has proudly proclaimed its mulnracial heruage, which mixes Indian and Spanish blood and cultures.
hnic bonds brought Germans together in a reunified country in 1990
after decades of division into East and West. In the early 1990s, Australia
mally recognized, after a century and a half of systematic denial, that its
Aboriginal peoples had some claim to the continent European settlers had
taken from thein. In Nigeria, long troubled by ethnic tensions and conflict,
novelist and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka (1996) argued that Nigeria’s via1 ity as a stat^epended on learning to reconcile and even celebrate its eth
nic diversity. With massive global migration, ethnic festivals, foods, and
customs enriched cultural life in cities across the world, while the advance
ot technology and mass communications made it easier than ever before for
maintain ties and identities even as they
moved Whether one views ethnicity and race as sources of conflict or
causes for celebration-or both at once-the point is the same: The 20th
century demonstrated that they were among the most potent forces in con
temporary societies.
As the 21st century began, these forces showed little sign of abating. At
he very start of the new millennium, the horror of 9/11 threw the Arab
population of the United States on the defensive. Arab Americans, many of
the Middle East, suddenly became the collective object of suspicion. Four
years later. Hurricane Katrma exposed a stark racial divide in New
Orle^ans, reminding many Americans of the high cost that some people pay
for being Black. Nor was America alone. The first years of the new century
saw enraged young North African Muslims torching neighborhoods in
\Paris, the City of Light, and Kurds struggling for autonomy in Iraq
Violence erupted between White Australians-some wearing T-shirts say
ing ethnic c eansing unit” (Sallis 2005)-and Middle Eastern immigrants
m the city of Sydney Warfare with ethnic overtones drove hundreds of
thousands of people from their homes in the Darfur province in western
The Puzzles of Ethnicity and Race
5
Sudan, while ethnic tensions slowed economic growth in the Ivory Coast of
West Africa. Anti-Semitism appeared resurgent in much of Europe, and
opposition to Korean and other minority populations simmered m Japan.
As these and a hundred other examples from around the world illustrate,
race and ethnicity continue to serve as vehicles of political assertion, tools
for exclusion and exploitation, sources of unity, and reservoirs of destruc
tive power. (The map in Figure 1.1 shows the locations of countries men
tioned in this book.)
An Onexpected Persistence and Power
It was not supposed to be this way. Ethnicity and race had been expected to
disappear as forces to be reckoned with in the modern world. The latter half
of the 20th century, by numerous accounts, was supposed to see a dramatic
attenuation of ethnic and racial ties. These and other seemingly parochial,
even premodem attachments were expected to decline as bases of human con
sciousness and action, being replaced by other, more comprehensive identities
linked to the vast changes shaping the modern world.
Certainly a good many sociologists expected as much. As early as 1926,
Robert Park, a professor at the University of Chicago and perhaps the most
influential American sociologist of his day, observed that certain forces at
work in the world were bound to dismantle the prejudices and boundaries
that separated races and peoples. Powerful global factors, argued Park
trade, migration, new communication technologies, even the cinema—were
bringing about a vast “interpenetration of peoples.” These factors. Park
(1926/1950) claimed, “enforce new contacts and result in new forms of
competition and of conflict. But out of this confusion and ferment, new and
more intimate forms of association arise” (p. 150). Indeed, wrote Park,
In the relations of races there is a cycle of events which tends everywhere
to repeat itself… .The race relations cycle which takes the form, to state it
abstractly, of contacts, competition, accommodation and evenmal assimilation,
is apparently progressive and irreversible. (P. 150)
Park wrote at a time when the term race had a broader meaning than
it does now. His conception of “races” treated separately, for example,
the Slavic peoples, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Puerto Ricans, Portuguese, and
others (Park 1934, 1939; see also Banton 1983, chap. 3). Today, if we were
to encounter these peoples in communities outside their countries of origin,
we would consider them ethnic groups or would combine them mto more
05
Figure 1.1
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